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Firefox Marketing Head Expresses Concerns Over Google's Apparent 'Only Be On Chrome' Push (medium.com)
Eric Petitt, head up Firefox marketing, writing in a blog: I use Chrome every day. Works fine. Easy to use. There are multiple things that bug me about the Chrome product, for sure, but I'm OK with Chrome. I just don't like only being on Chrome. And that's what Chrome wants. It wants you to only use Chrome. Chrome is not evil, it's just too big for its britches. Its influence on the internet economy and individuals is out of balance. Chrome, with 4 times the market share of its nearest competitor (Firefox), is an eight-lane highway to the largest advertising company in the world. Google built it to maximize revenue from your searches and deliver display ads on millions of websites. To monetize every... single... click. And today, there exists no meaningful safety valve on its market dominance. Beyond Google, the web looks more and more like a feudal system, where the geography of the web has been partitioned off by the Frightful Five. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are our lord and protectors, exacting a royal sum for our online behaviors. We're the serfs and tenants, providing homage inside their walled fortresses. Noble upstarts are erased or subsumed under their existing order. (Footnote: Petitt has made it clear that the aforementioned views are his own, and not those of Mozilla.)
Only be on DOS
Only be on Windows 3.1
Only be on Netscape
Only be on AOL
Only be on IE
Only be on Mac
Only be on iPhone
Only be on Windows phone
Only be on Android
Only
Only
Only
Manufacturers have been trying to lock people into their platform since people began selling stuff. Computers, software, tools, vehicle, you name it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It's time for the DOJ to crack down on Google for anticompetitive behavior. They're quite possibly even worse than Microsoft was in the 1990s. Unfortunately, I have no confidence that a DOJ in the Trump administration will enforce the nation's laws. Get rid of Trump and Sessions, and perhaps there will be hope of enforcing existing antitrust laws.
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Make Firefox not suck. I had a laundry list of issues with FF that culminated in my switching to Chrome, where everything "just works". I used FF for *years*, until I literally couldn't make myself keep fighting with the browser.
This is not just Google's fault - people are writing Chrome-only websites. Not surprisingly, google.com only supports U2F (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_2nd_Factor) on Chrome. Surprisingly and infuriatingly, other tech companies are doing the same, even though Firefox supports U2F with a plugin. Dropbox and Atlassian both require Chrome for U2F, and refuse to try to work with Firefox. (Kudos to Github for doing it right.)
Beyond Google, the web looks more and more like a feudal system, where the geography of the web has been partitioned off by the Frightful Five. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are our lord and protectors, exacting a royal sum for our online behaviors.
Segmentation is natural in a oligarchy. I would suggest to you that Microsoft, was one the sole leader in the tech world, and lost its dominance by thinking it was "it". The others will eventually fail. We may be too short sighted to notice it happening.
The point being, the "next" big thing is going to hit, and these guys are all going to miss it. Probably, because the next big thing won't be anything we expect, it will happen organically. This is why I don't see 3D stuff as being successful. It might be, when there is a "killer app" that requires it to function. Since 3D porn, movies and games haven't really taken off yet, it is either too premature, or not required for functionality.
I haven't a clue what the next big thing is, because it likely hasn't reached maturity, and hasn't found the "killer" status that will cause it to take off. If I had a suspicion, I would think augmented reality would be the "next big thing", but it is still years away from being "killer".
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
What I'd really like is for all the Google service sites to STFU and remember when I say I don't want Chrome. Every fucking page for every fucking site has some sort of pop-up box, banner, or somesuch that uses Microsoft tacticts to suggest that somehow this web service will work better in Chrome than some other web-compliant browser like the one I'm already using (Firefox). If closing/dismissing/saying "NO" would silence them for good that'd be one thing, but they won't fucking go away. They keep coming back.
Sorry, Google, but the dozen or so background processes Chrome launches that arrogantly assume that you're doing nothing else with your computer and Chrome therefore has implicit permission to own every all RAM and CPU 100%, crowding out everything else with they sheer quantity of the number of spawned threads has resulted in you being banned from my systems. Go the fuck away and leave me alone and stop trying to take over the world, assholes.
Mozilla has been pushing hard to make Firefox to be exactly like Google Chrome along with its limitations and lack of customizability. By Firefox v57 there will be no reason to ever use Firefox anymore because of Web Extensions won't allow users to install real extensions that allow them to actually change Firefox's behavior and UI as they want it to instead of Mozilla's ideology of having Firefox be a Chrome copycat. The pathetic Theme options in future Firefox versions is just as awful as Windows 10's themes and limited color choices, meaning no real options at all.
So I find it hilarious that somebody from Mozilla is concerned with Chrome becoming the only web browser in town when it's Mozilla themselves pushing the remaining Firefox users away towards Google Chrome because of their behavior and border-line user hostility. Because why bother using a gimmick when you can use the real thing?
This space is not for rent.
A great option (or at least a GOOD option) IMO is Iridium. It mostly is Chromium recompiled with some privacy defaults (that you could set in Chrome or Chromium in about 5 minutes), but also ALL the google hooks removed.
Brave sounds ok, but given that they have tried offering stuff like "replace your ads with ours" and are busy studying "how to monetize the web" or whatever with an "attention token", I wouldn't feel comfortable going all-in on them.
https://brave.com/about_ad_replacement.html
Will being brave magically remove the headphone jack from my PC and phone?
It wasn't too long ago that Firefox was viewed as an amazing browser (ob: https://xkcd.com/198/ ), far better than the alternatives, and FOSS to boot. But like it's predecessors, it got slow, bloated, and bogged down in trying to implement features too far outside the core mission of a browser. Chrome came along and snatched the performance crown and mindshare. If you have already conceded that Google is allowed to harvest all your data in exchange for free products/services, then by all means keep using Chrome. However, if you value your privacy, it is time to give Firefox another chance. It really has improved a lot in the last couple of years in terms of stability and performance, to the point where it meets or exceeds Chrome in every aspect. Give Firefox an honest chance, you might switch back.
Perhaps given your job title you should look at your own performance and take a closer look at home as to why Firefox doesn't do as well as it should. If you don't competition get out of the game.
Read through this bug on adding concurrency to Firefox to get a good feeling why Mozilla lost so much browser market share:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
"Always with you what cannot be done."
$350M in funding per year, and they couldn't straighten out threads/processes. A bunch of crazy-ass trendy projects that got killed - those got millions of dollars in funding each. Users cursing at their slow browser - not even a priority.
If Chrome is winning (has won?), it's because its dev team seems to have an "OK, we'll fix that" attitude.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I agree totally with Mr. Petitt, that there needs to be independence from corporate giants on the web and, as somebody who opens a lot of tabs, running faster and leaner is something I like.
But that ain't enough of a value proposition for me and my business. Google provides email, storage and on line apps for free to any computer with a Chrome browser. Google offers analytics that allow businesses to track their web presence. Then there's the search thing. To be fair, many of these resources are available from Google on Firefox, but then you get a nagging message saying that others aren't available except on Chrome.
I'm looking forward to widespread adoption of HTML5 and it's APIs to help level the playing field, but without solid, tangible tools and resources uniquely available to Firefox it's always going to be used as an open-source, non-evil alternative to Chrome.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Cool the torches there buddy. I get where you are coming from but I think we're a little past that point. You've got a great argument at say 20% delta between first and second place, but we're way, way, way past that point. Chrome is at 54% with second place at 15% and that's Apple's Safari which I'm sure 90% of that 15% is iPhone. That's an almost 40% difference between the two. While no one is screaming monopoly (okay maybe a few but no one cares about them), we're in the territory where we should grow a bit concerned.
The W3C manages the standards of the web and even then Google has an insanely heavy hand in the process there and even if W3C doesn't agree to something, who cares, Google just does it anyway. So I get it, competition and all, but there's a point where we should pro-actively start looking at what checks are in place to ensure that Google doesn't make W3C, OASIS, et al completely irrelevant.
You know how people say that "gee I wish people were more proactive before monopolies formed?" Yeah, we're there, this is that point where it is time to ask questions. Not asking questions, not ensuring that Google just doesn't start stomping standards and going the non-evil form of embrace, enhance, and extinguish, ensuring the young whipper snappers that Google hires don't GNOME 3 the hell out of the Internet, that's the entire point. It's not to say, "OMG! Google is just too big, has way too much a lead over other browsers, it's just not fair *wail to heavens*". It is to say, "Hey, uh, do we have enough checks and balances to ensure that Google doesn't use their lead to just fudge bomb how the web works?" The answer is pretty much no and that's been a concern for like forever (I remember conversations about this issue back in late 1990s and W3C was way smaller then), but more so now that I lot more people happen to be on the Internet daily.
Totally understand your position, but just up and up being cynical and telling them to go f'off, !!CAPITALISM!! Is exactly the crap that just leads to an insanely high level of apathy that ultimately leads to the same folks that said !!CAPITALISM!! saying, "WTF?! Where were you all and why didn't you stop them?!?!" I for one don't want another IE and neither should anyone else. We need an organization that can literally say, "Google Chrome is not compliant with ISO(ideally W3 as opposed to ISO)-96716723(whatever) of HTML rendering standards, they are a non-standard browser." And we should actively shun non-standard browsers.
Also, just want to add that this nowhere even gets into how slow the W3C has been, how they totally missed the ball on mobile-everything, and how they are totally getting left behind in IoT. So there's an even amount of blame to lay on W3C's feet too. Also mobile OS makers and what not, there's some blame heading to them too... It's a really complex topic, but yeah screaming !!CAPITALISM!! isn't going to fix jack crap and possible just make it worse off.
Read through this bug on adding concurrency to Firefox to get a good feeling why Mozilla lost so much browser market share:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
After reading, what I get is the devs saying procceses/threads as dictated wont solve the problems being described. And that they will work to solve them a different way.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
I head up Firefox marketing, but I use Chrome every day.
That speaks volumes to the quality of Firefox.
But talking to friends, it sounds more and more like living on Chrome has started to feel like their only option. And unfortunately, too many people think Firefox isn’t a modern alternative.
Except it is. Yes, three years ago, Firefox was reeling. But today, Firefox is SO much better than it was even a year ago.
So, you're failing at your job and blaming your friends for not using a browser that you won't even use? Hold on, I came prepared.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
When they changed, unnecessarily mind you, the interface to their browser for about the millionth time. Just right when I was completely comfortable with the reload button being in the Nth spot and the Cancel button being in the Nth+1 spot they decided to move it all to the other side or just plain hide it from me.
Which meant I had to one figure out where things went to. Second, had to try to get used to the new button locations.
The Thunderbird project has a very bad habit of doing the same thing as well.
Only use Firefox now for compatibility testing. Otherwise it is just a memory hog that I remember as being run by people who do not have any appreciation for how they really upset people's workflow when they get a wild hair and feel the need to have all of the furniture on the other side of the room.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Firefox. uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere. Pfsense box is the gatekeeper to my network. pfBlockerng + DNSBL lists means I can watch youtube videos on my smart tv with 0 ads.
Take back YOUR network; YOUR computer.
No, for that you need Courage.
What should you do if your favorite web site prefers the Chromium engine, but you yourself hate the spyware Google created around it (named Chrome) ?
Look for a well supported Chromium-based browser:
There is not only Brave but also **Iridium Browser** (https://iridiumbrowser.de).
They claim adherence to European data protection standards, as well as having an reproducible and audible build process.
My main browser in the desktop is Seamonkey. I use it on Windows, I use it on NetBSD, I would probably use it if I ran a linux desktop. I usually only run Chrome if I really need to access something on a url where noscript just won't allow it to load. Chrome is the throwaway browser I am not afraid to wipe and reinstall if I need to go somewhere that might be toxic.
A bunch of crazy-ass trendy projects that got killed
You should read up on Mozilla's Electrolysis and Quantum projects. Seems like Mozilla's got an "OK, we'll fix that" attitude to me.